Acrobat Freezes on Last Page When Performing OCR On Textbook

[roweder]

This is an issue I am encountering on multiple computers with several different PDF files.  When performing the recognize text function, or optical character recognition, Adobe Acrobat recognizes text on an entire PDF of a textbook and then freezes on the last page.  Windows does not report the program as "not responding" and Acrobat does not report an error either.  However, it does become very difficult to switch to the Acrobat window.  Also, CPU usage does not spike to 100% (I checked individual threads as well, no individual thread is being utilized near 100% when this is happening).

The program simply sits on what appears to be the last step of the text recognition until I give up on it and end the task in task manager.

The whole process typically takes about 20 minutes.  20 minutes of text recognition, then sitting on last page for an indefinite amount of time.

With numerous files I have attempted to remedy the problem by printing to PDF, saving it, and repeating the text recognition process on that file.  I have tried uploading to google drive, printing to PDF from google drive, saving it, and repeating the process on that file.  I have tried changing the text recognition settings to "Searchable Image", "Searchable Image (Exact)", and "Editable Text and Images", but each setting has the same result.  I have tried allowing the program to sit in this seemingly not crashed, but also not properly functioning state over night, but to no avail.

I have encountered this issue with multiple different PDF textbooks and on several different university computers as well as my own personal computer, with my personal adobe subscription.  I have no idea what is causing it.  The only thing I haven't tried is doing this on a mac.  I don't really use the university macs because scrolling is backwards and it gets me every time.  Regardless, this functionality should work on any platform.

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Sometimes I am curious if Adobe is simply teaching me quantum.  It has my PDF in a superposition of crashed and fully text-recognized states.  It will remain in this superposition of states indefinitely until a measurement is made.  Perhaps the problem is that I haven't figured out how to perform a measurement on this system yet.

Here is a link to a PDF the same error occurs with:

http://www.fisica.net/mecanica-quantica/Griffiths%20-%20Introduction%20to%20quantum%20mechanics.pdf

This textbook is so old and popular it is provided on PDF for free from multiple different sources.

EDIT:

It turns out that if I leave Adobe as the currently active window, it does get recognized as "Not Responding"

If any solutions to this problem are known, please reply to this thread!

Thank you,

Derek

[AkanchhaS]

Hi Derek,

Sorry for the delay in response.

Thank you for sharing the detailed information of the issue and the sample PDF. Since you have experienced this problem on multiple PDF files which were tested, I assume that there might be the problem with the application version you are working on?

We have checked the file at our end and perform Recognize Text function using Acrobat DC version 2019.010.20064 on Windows computer. The OCR worked absolutely fine without getting stuck at the end of the page.

Could you please help us with the Acrobat version you are working on multiple computers? Open Acrobat>Help>About Acrobat.

Also, you may check if there is any update is pending. Open Acrobat >Help>Check for update. Or you may refer to the release notes and DC Release Notes — Release Notes for Acrobat DC Products  to manually install it.

You may also follow the troubleshooting steps suggested in the official help article here: Troubleshoot errors, freezes | Adobe Reader | Windows

Regards,

Akanchha

[HipOath]

I am having the same problem with Acrobat freezing on the last page of a file when I am performing OCR.  It's now December 2, 2019, a year later.  One would think that Adobe would have fixed this problem.  Frankly, the online version of your program is really buggy and, as is usual with Abode, Acrobat is incredibly obscure.  In any case, I have to go back to my disk application and run OCR in order to avoid this problem.  Bill Campisi

[syblcat]

November 2023 and I'm having this issue again too. I had this problem maybe six months ago, and was on the phone with an adobe tech, shared my computer with him and even he had issues trying to figure out the problem. He ended up resolving it, but I don't even know what he did to fix it. Now I'm having the same issue again. Aargh!